Review: Queen of the Whole Universe Saturday 27 June St James Theatre, Wellington. Miss France was missing because of an accident with a hotel table and Miss Mexico was stuck in quarantine at Wellington Airport, but all the rest of the international and intergalactic beauties were there in force for the first ever production of QWU to come to the capital! And the civil servants, blue-rinse-and-fur theatre aristocracy and a who's who of the politically active capital queer elite, mixing cheerfully with the city's hoi polloi were there in force to greet them. Wellington did QWU proud – and vice versa - although the whole thing came close to a collapse of inter-island diplomacy when Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast broke the golden rule and out-dressed (almost outshone) hosts Buffy and Bimbo with a sleek sparkly black number and cape that had drag queens’ eyes turning a jealous shade of green! Miss Garden of Eden come one, come all, the good and the bad, it has to be one of the most inclusive art forms in history! More important, it was fabulous fun and fabulously funny, over the top, sometimes acidly clever and, often, utterly beautiful. It occurs to me that the strap line "a very queer beauty pageant" could easily have been changed for the Wellington performance to "a very queer wearable arts". QWU winner: Miss Oz - Barbie Prawne Miss Oz, Ms Barby Prawne (a.k.a. Owen Anderson) emerged a deserving triumph, though my money was on second place getter Miss Japan, Kitty Tammy-Gucci (Andrae Fassier) for sheer artistry and my heart (as an aging leather queen) was firmly beating for deservedly third placed Miss England Annette Curtain (Ed Jenner). Us aging queens have to root for each other – no-one else will (apart from the occasional obliging gerontophile). One of the undoubted crowd favourites was the headgear of nations parade, where the competition seemed to be one of how much height and width could be added to a queen's crowning glory without actually resulting in a royal fall from grace. Miss Zambia cleverly avoided this dilemma by appearing in a wheelchair! Here we saw colour, imagination and (sheer strength!) aplenty with some crowd-pleasing UV and fancy electronics thrown in for good measure. Of course, the final artistic performance by the finalists was the finale with the fizz. Again, I was inclined to go for Miss Japan's journey from grace to Nippon pop shock – but a gutsy performance from Miss Oz undoubtedly carried her through to the ultimate crown. Unfortunately for Miss England I was too distracted by one of her soldier boys (and the fact that – sadly – I knew every word of every clichéd song) and did not give her the attention she deserved! Your hostesses Bimbo QWU's world record-busting number of drag queens is shown below. Steve Attwood - 28th June 2009